The Piper
by Captain Fantastic
Summary: A tale of a shop with a dragon-green door, a city overrun with rats, and a debt that must be paid. (The Pied Piper, revisited.) Second draft is uploaded.
1. Begynder Ord

**Two notes from the author regarding her work: **

**1. This story is set in the fabulous world of Clar the Pirate's _From_ _Andersen Sanders_ with her full and express permission. You don't need to have read that story to read this one, but honestly you should read it anyway because it's marvelous.  
**

**2. For those of you who prefer to have a glossary, the last chapter of this story has definitions of the Danish terms I use. They can be understood in context, but I know that some people prefer to have it written out.  
**

**Thanks for reading.  
**

* * *

_**Begynder Ord**_

_**X  
**_

The problem with the piper was that she was obviously someone important, but she carried that importance like a box of secrets and none of us could ever pry it open. I don't mean to say that she was secretive. If you asked a question she would answer it, straight and sharp and with never a hint of irony. Maybe the real problem was that no one ever figured out the right questions to ask.

That's not true. I think Jak had her all figured out, but if there was ever a sorry soul who could figure out Jak, I certainly haven't met them.

That's not relevant. The only thing you need to know about the piper was that she appeared one day and set up shop in the north of town, by the unfinished foundation of old King Fritz's marble church. You know the place—always cluttered with moony Fransk painters who think it's some kind of ancient ruin. On the day she arrived, the piper leased the shop with the dragon-green door and before anyone thought to introduce themselves, there was a little hand-painted sign over the entrance that said "_Prakstisk Magi_. Enthusiasts and Alchemists un-Welcome."

No one really knew what to do about this strange woman and her Practical Magic. Some assumed it was an elaborate joke. Others (mostly the aforementioned Enthusiasts and Alchemists) were miffed. Supposedly one of the Barefoot Monks hung out the bell tower and denounced her as Jezebel Returned, but you know how rumors go. If the Blackfeets had wasted that much energy denouncing every practitioner of the Arts, they would never have found the time to translate all those verses the historians are always going on about.

Remember Kobenhaven in those days? We were a city built on the _mystiske__. _The very streets were carved from runestones of the early days of Absalom, and every spire was etched with the blessed _afværge_ against lightening. The street corners were the domain of the common _tryllekunstner, _who could cast the coin from his hand and find it again behind your ear. The crooning _spåkoner_ sat in every market square, tapping the tarot cards with nails like iron. And in the darker alleys there were the _D__ødmestre__, _weaving smoke and nightmares—but Their mention is not fit for polite society.

The point is that Kobenhaven was no stranger to magic. As for the piper's_Prakstisk Magi_, well, maybe we weren't ready for something as unforgiving as the Practical.

I've lost myself again. _Lyt_, all you need to know is that one day we had never heard of the piper, and the next day she was selling potions for headaches and remedies for spider bites and answers to questions like she'd lived behind that dragon-green door her entire life.

You know of the rats, _ja_? How could anyone not know of that horde of vermin that nearly devoured our beautiful city, bite by bite? The Blackfeets said prayers and emptied their stores to feed the hungry, but the food ran low and the rats only multiplied. The _tryllekunstnere _with their false pockets and _spåkoner _with their painted decks couldn't save us. Maybe the _D__ødmestre _could have helped (the idea was discussed, albeit in hushed tones and private corners), but we could not—or would not—afford Their price.

Then again, some might say the same about the piper.

I keep saying "we," but you know I was only a child then. A _fugl __af luften_, with less than an ounce of grounded sense in my entire body. Are you wondering if I can possibly remember a time so far gone? I remember every detail. I remember the starched cotton of the piper's grey dress and how it never so much as swayed with her step. She always wore grey, from her shoes to the Bergère hat on her head (without an artful tilt or ostrich plume in sight). I also remember the jagged pain of a rat-bite, whenever I stuck my hand in the cupboard without looking first. I even remember the name and face of every child who crossed the _Ø__resund_ with the piper—every forsaken soul in that little skiff. I remember them so well that sometimes at night I reach out to touch Magda on the shoulder, to reassure her that the _Draug_ is not coming alongside in his foggy half-boat, waiting to drag us into the depths.

I am a man grown, but still a _fugl __af luften_. I cannot let them go.

I have lost myself again.

Maybe the real problem with the piper is that she was a spawn of the ninth hell, and in the dead of night, after I've told Magda not to be afraid, I tell that piping devil, wherever she may be, that I hope she dies screaming.

Have I offended you? _Hvad_, did you think the piper was the heroine of this tale? That is through no fault of mine, for if you remember the rats then you must also remember the children. You must also remember what she did to us. Insofar as the tales of true living have heroes and villains, the piper is the worm that wriggles in the mud beneath the villain's shoe.

I am shocking you. Let me begin this tale again, once and for all.

There was only one problem with the piper. She did not accept gratitude in lieu of payment. That is all you need to know.

Now let me tell you of the children that she stole.


	2. Edvin

**_Edvin_**

**X_  
_**

I never liked Edvin very much. It wasn't his fault, I suppose. We can't help what we're made of, and Edvin was made of plush velvet, little gold rings that were too tight on his pudgy fingers, and a certainty that the world belonged to him and would be handed over as soon as he grew bored of more trivial pursuits. He always smelled strongly of curdled cream. As I said, it was not his fault. Such _sludder_ can only be gifts from our parents. From what I knew of his esteemed parentage, they had enough _sludder _to fling an excess into the _Ø__resund _for the Festival of the Tides. Unfortunately, I think the King of the Sea would have no taste for curdled cream, so Edvin Brandt, singular pride and joy of his illustrious parents, remained the sole inheritor of the World as He Conceived It.

_Hvad_, I am not allowed a little fun? Perfectly harmless, I assure you. But perhaps you think it uncouth to speak ill of the dead.

As you wish.

Edvin Brandt was a delightful lad of unparalleled parentage who had started spending so much time in the library of the Barefoot Monks that his childish plumpness was becoming a respectable paunch. So it was that when he first laid eyes on the piper, he was carrying a stack of books under one arm and a pastry in each hand. She was standing on a wooden stool outside her dragon-green door, straightening her sign. At Edvin's approach, she stepped down.

"_Prakstisk Magi,_" Edvin read aloud. "What sort of magic is that?"

"The useful sort," she replied.

Edvin didn't like the appraising way she looked at him and that she didn't fail to notice the pastries that were flaking to pieces in his hands. He made a show of hefting the books, so she would notice them as well.

Politely, she took his meaning.

"_Undere Magi_," she read from one of the spines. "You are a magician?"

Because he was ever-confident in his ownership of the World, Edvin had never before been tempted to lie. But then he finished reading the sign that dangled, still crookedly, over the piper's head.

"After a fashion," he said. It was truthful enough.

I probably should have mentioned that Edvin was an Enthusiast, or at least a budding one. He could have become the best of them, too. I never liked him much, but I won't begrudge him that. Underneath all that velvet and curdled cream, he had a mind like a cracking whip. The Blackfeets always called him _drengen __der spørger_, the boy who asks. Because that was what he was always doing.

"Why don't you like Enthusiasts?" he asked her.

"Because you waste knowledge for the sake of being considered knowledgeable," she said.

"How did you know I'm an Enthusiast?" he asked, trying very hard not to be overawed.

(A budding Enthusiast, I remind you. Edvin was always one to overstate his own success.)

"You just said so," she replied.

She did not say it snidely. I've told you before, the piper was ever sharp and straightforward. She would answer every question put to her in the same deliberate fashion. That was probably why Edvin liked her so much. Despite the fact that he was officially un-Welcome, Edvin spent most of his spare time in the little shop. He hung over the counter and asked questions that the piper would usually answer, when she wasn't busy helping a customer or prodding at the items on her shelves so that every bottle and book was in perfect, indisputable order. The cream for spider bites had to be to the left of the salve for rat bites, which was selling as quickly as she produced it to farmers who came into the shop, twisting their hats and smelling of the countryside. The vials for headache and heartbreak must be arranged just so, which each label outward, the distance between so precise it might have been measured.

There was a table opposite the shelves that stood on legs of curved iron. On its glossy surface were—of all the things in_ de vide verden_—instruments. A handful of whistles carved from the tusks of the _troldfolk_ that live in the mountain deeps, a hollowed wooden stick filled with pebbles that made a sound like falling rain, and a strange box with strings that would break your heart if the right fingers ever plucked them. And in the back right corner of the table, so subtle that it was weeks before I even noticed it, was a pipe of wood the color of night. It was enshrined in an unremarkable box lined with green velvet. Some days the box was open and the pipe glistened darkly in the light from the window. Some days the box was closed. I never got up the courage to ask the piper why.

But I don't want to talk about that _forbandet _pipe.

Beside the table of instruments was a tall shelf reserved only for the books of common _afværger_, with their swirls and vorticis and disci neatly drawn on fresh white parchment—wardings against flood and famine and sword and storm. I once asked the piper—rather cleverly I thought—why she kept the _afværger_ in her shop of Practical Magic, when such warding symbols were widely considered a holdover from the ancient days of Absalom, mildly effective at best. (Even then, the more progressive Enthusiasts were hypothesizing that they were not effective at all.)

"There is power in what the mind believes to be true," she had said, elbow-deep in a pot of some viscous, foul-smelling substance that would supposedly ease an aching stomach, when it was complete.

"The mind is no remedy for war and famine," I'd pointed out.

"But the mind creates the illusion of safety—_Lyt_, stop being useless and hand me that vial—and safety gives hope, and hope survives war and famine."

Wait, do not place the piper on those philosophical heights you are even now constructing in your imagination. Let me finish:

"Maybe it would be simpler to sell bottled hope," said I.

"People do not pay coin for hope," she said. "People pay coin for _afværger_."

In the end, that room behind the dragon-green door was a shop, and the piper was a shopkeeper, and shopkeepers ply trade for coin. If it had been otherwise—if the piper had been the angel of Hope and Truth that you seem so desperate to make her—then that skiff would never have set sail across the _Ø__resund _on that cold night. Then I would not be sitting here and telling you this sad tale.

_Sgu_ _stjernerne_, you have let me lose myself again in irrelevancies.

Edvin had no interest in hope or _afværger_ or remedies for stomachaches. He cared little for the trappings of magic that lined the shelves of the tidy little shop. He knew the real magic was the knowledge that the piper kept hidden in that box inside herself. The knowledge that he tried in vain to unravel, every day in the shop, by asking question after question. But though the piper always answered him in her straightforward fashion, somehow Edvin never really learned anything that he wanted to know. As I've said before, I don't think any of us ever figured out the right questions to ask.

There aren't many Enthusiasts anymore, which is one of the great ironies of our Great Age. Enthusiasts were the forerunners of the _Alder af __Oplysningstiden_, that intellectual age which even now resonates in our bones, in the very way that magic used to resonate there. Enthusiasts denounced magic as a figment of humanity's youthful imagination. Now that humans were beyond the dark age of Absalom, it was time we left behind the follies of that time. The Enthusiasts believed in studying the folly, in unraveling the figment. By empowering ourselves with enlightenment, we could leave behind the darkness.

In many ways, they succeeded in their purpose. Our City of Spires is no more a city of runes and _afværger. _The _tryllekunstnere _and_ spåkoner_ are gone from the streets. Magic is obsolete.

And so are the Enthusiasts.

There, you see the irony, _ja_?

I confess that wicked irony almost eases the ache in my bones when I think of the city I left behind all those years ago, and what had become of it by the time I returned. Almost.

I do not weep for the Enthusiasts' self-inflicted redundancy. Sometimes, though, I weep for Edvin. He was thirteen the year he met the piper—just a boy. All he wanted in life were the answers to his questions.

"Are you a magician?" he asked the piper one day.

"_Ja_. Now, take this rag. If you are going to lean on my counter all day then you might as well make yourself useful."

"What kind of magic can you do?" He wiped the polished wood with the loose, uneven strokes of someone who has never held a rag in his life.

"The kind that costs coin."

"How much?"

"More than you could afford. _Nej, nej,_ like this, see?"

Edvin leaned back on the counter top, watching her precise movements with only passing interest.

"My father is rich," he said.

She did not reply. Another farmer came into the shop, scuffing his dusty boots uncertainly on the doormat. The piper did not need to ask why he had come. She went immediately went to the shelf and took down a bottle of the salve for rat bites. The farmer handed over his payment, muttered his thanks, and left. The piper made a few neat notes in the ledger she kept behind the counter. She looked up to see Edvin still watching her every movement.

"_Hvad, _you are still here?" she asked.

"I have more questions."

"Then I have one for you."

"_Ja_?"

"What will you be when you are a man grown, Edvin Brandt?"

He thought for a moment.

"Whatever I want to be," was his reply.

The piper nodded.

"I have to make more salve. Ask your questions while you stir."

I never understood why the piper always answered his questions, why day after day she let him pass beneath the sign that declared him un-Welcome and lean against her countertop, pretending to polish it while he asked and asked. I do understand why Edvin kept going back. The piper with her potions and salves, with her _afværger_ and answers to all the wrong questions—she was bewitching. How could the _drengen __der spørger _resist?

How could any of us?


	3. Magda

**_Magda_**

**_X  
_**

Magda was the mayor's daughter, but we never held that against her. At eleven years old, she was the youngest of us, but she never told tales and only cried when there was good reason for it. She was a slip of a thing and only stood as tall as my shoulders. She weighed even less than she looked. The day she broke her ankle in the _Rundetårn_, I carried her all the way to the shop with the dragon-green door without tiring.

"Can you fix it?" I asked, without a greeting.

"Not for free," said the piper. She barely glanced up from her ledger.

"We don't have any money."

"Then take her to her parents."

_"Nej_!" Magda cried. "Papa will murder me."

(We had been forbidden on numerous occasions from climbing the winding path to the roof of the _Rundetårn_, but why should that stop us?)

"I find that unlikely," said the piper.

Magda was starting to sniffle, but the piper was unmoved. By this point, Magda was growing heavy in my arms. I blame the exhaustion, and perhaps her piteous tears, for the idiocy that came next from my mouth.

"I will work here, as long as it takes to pay the debt, Fru—" But of course I did not know her name.

The piper looked up. It was the first time she had ever looked at me truly, though I had done my share of spying from a distance with the other children. You will accuse me of flights of fancy when I tell you that her eyes were not a true color. _Det sandt_, my friend. I speak the truth. My first thought was the green of unpolished jadestone, but I think now they were the blue of an angry sea interspersed with the saffron of sunrise. But there was brown there as well, the brown of leaves fallen in winter. Perhaps it was but fancy_._ I was only a child in those days, a _fugl __af luften_. And I have told you before that the piper was bewitching us all.

But she had that way about her. That secret that could not be unraveled. That box inside herself that could not be pried open. From the first words she spoke to me, I was caught in the current that surrounded her. You see, I learned a great many things from that devil they call the piper, but I never did learn how she knew my name.

"And what use are you to me, Frederik Lauritz Vestergaard?" she asked.

(_Ja_, quite a mouthful for the flitting little thing I was in those days. That is why the world called me Fritz.)

"How do you know my name?" asked I.

"That is the wrong question, Herr Vestergaard. The right question is why I choose to know it. Names are dangerous, and you should not wear yours so openly."

Don't ask me what she meant. I do not pretend to understand her. All I know is that while she was talking, she was leading us to the back room of the little shop and gathering a book from the tall shelf.

"In the chair with the little one—_nej_, no more tears. I do not have time for them."

"And what is your name?" I asked the piper, as I helped Magda situate herself on the chair, with her hurt ankle propped on an old crate. She was very bravely attempting not to cry, but I know that the pain must have been terrible.

I think the piper smiled at me, briefly, as she flipped through the pages of the blood-red tome, but I cannot be sure.

"I have told you, Herr Vestergaard. Names are dangerous. Why would I give you mine so freely? If you are going to work in this shop, you must learn to listen."

I was still coming to terms with my new employment when the piper began to read from the book—not aloud, but with her eyes flying and her lips moving at such a pace that I thought she would finish the book before anything happened. Then Magda began to cry in earnest, and I held her hand. In the dusty half-light of that strange storage room, I tried to be brave for the both of us.

I cannot remember that day without thinking of the night on the boat. Magda cried so much harder in the middle of the _Ø__resund_. She was convinced that the ghostly boat of the Draug would come alongside and drag us to into the depths. I always tried to be brave for little Magda, but bravery could not help her in the end.

_Sgu_ _stjernerne_, you have let me lose myself again.

The piper's subtle magic worked more beautifully than I had dared hope. Within minutes, Magda's tears had turned to astonished laughter as she jumped up and down with her newly healed ankle. I had seen the _tryllekunstnere _with their coin tricks, of course, and a _spåkone _had once told my fortune, but I had never known magic to be so simple and useful. On that day, and for many days to follow, I was in awe of the piper—_lille fjols_ that I was. A perfect idiot.

But you don't need to know of those days that I spent behind the dragon-green door, stocking shelves and sweeping floors and wiping the counter while Edvin lazed around and asked questions. Sometimes the other children would come too and the piper would stare with barely concealed bemusement then put us all to work. Sometimes I remember those days to be wonderful—but how could they be, when they were only the precursor to the evil that followed?

But I was telling you about Magda.

If I was in awe of the piper, Magda worshipped the very ground on which she walked. If her father had not expressly forbade it (indeed, the mayor enjoyed forbidding things expressly), then Magda would have taken my position in the shop in a heartbeat. I told her often that I would have gladly let her, but secretly I loved nothing better than slipping through the dragon-green door in the early morning, pulling on the thin white apron that the piper gave me to wear, and taking a quick stroll through the shop, running my finger along the shelves and tables, memorizing every object.

I remember one morning Magda caught me at this ritual.

"_Hvad sker der_, Fritz? What are you doing?" she asked me.

I whirled to face her. She was such a small thing that she moved with the silence of a cat (unless she was throwing a tantrum, and then she had all the grace of stampeding horses). I remember she was wearing the blue ribbons in her braided hair.

"Nothing," I told her, looking around for the piper, who was nowhere to be seen.

Magda stared at me for a few moments, but she did not ask more questions. I always liked that about Magda. She never pried into affairs that were not her own.

"Do you need something?" I asked her.

"_Nej_," she said, but she had an expression on her face that I knew meant mischief.

"Tell me," I said. (It never took much to wrest a secret from Magda.)

"You will never guess what I saw yesterday after you went home."

"I don't want to guess. Tell me."

"My mama wanted the warding against rats—she found three in the pantry—and the _Frue_ had to climb the ladder to the top shelf to reach the book."

"So?" I asked impatiently. I was beginning to suspect that Magda's story was going to be a reprise of the time she kept me listening to a tale for almost an hour, only to end with the news that she had found a half-penny in the gutter. _Helvede_ _være_ _velsignet_, Magda—who has time for such things?

"The _Frue_'s petticoats—" here she looked around with exaggerated vigilance "—were rainbows!"

"_Hvad? _I don't believe you."

"It is true! I saw them. Beneath that grey sack she wears, her petticoats are all the colors of a rainbow."

Again I told her I did not believe her. Magda had never been a liar, but the idea of bursting color beneath the piper's trim grey exterior was sacrilege to me. The piper was a foundation stone of order and severity. I liked that about her. I liked the uniformity of her. I liked that she was dependable.

_Lyt_, if you must know, I liked the routine behind the dragon-green door because when I went home at night, I found only chaos. It is a story you have heard told time and time again, so I will not fill your ears with it now. I do not want your pity. I want you to understand that our City of Spires was a different city back then, a place where a magician set up shop behind a dragon-green door and children made deals for her magic. A place where a boy with fat fingers could ask a million questions and a girl with blue ribbons could swear with wide eyes that she saw rainbows. A place where I could put on a white apron and run my fingers across the runes of an age that has since been lost.

Sometimes I forget myself and think fondly on those days, but then I remember the way Magda cried on the _Ø__resund_, and I am left with nothing but grief.

_Nej_, I cannot speak of Magda any longer. All you need to know is that she did not deserve whatever happened to her. None of us did.


	4. Lisbet

**_Lisbet_**

**_X  
_**

Lisbet Sommer was the golden one. She was the oldest of us, all gentle smiles and quick laughter and a trail of swains in her wake. Sometimes she was prim and condescending, with a quirk of her lips and a shake of her head. Most of the time she was effervescent.

Edvin was so in love with her, poor _fjols_. But that is irrelevant to the tale.

Lisbet's father was a peer to the renowned Alchemist Giustiniani Bono, that strange foreigner who was rumored to have one day appeared from midair, walking through the garden gate of his eminence the Marquis Palome d'Aureo of Rom. I do not believe in such fancy, but Herr Sommer's correspondence with the man made him the most revered Alchemist of Kobenhaven. At the height of his fame, he married a young _spåkone_, a beggar from the streets with a painted tarot deck and eyes like opals. Their romance was the stuff of legends.

So you see, Lisbet was the daughter of the _mystiske_. Froken Sommer was thought to have the Sight. Herr Sommer was on the verge of divining the secrets of the _Vises Sten_, that legendary stone with the gift of life eternal.

He never got the chance. The rats came first. I wonder sometimes if Froken Sommer saw them coming.

Lisbet hated the rats. It wasn't simple fear or disgust. It was a fiery loathing that came from some place deep inside her. I still shudder to remember some of the curses our golden girl would shriek at the vermin whenever one dared cross her path. Near the fall of summer, as they began to creep into even the wealthier homes of the city, Lisbet sought solace in the only place that was consistently free from them. The shop with the dragon-green door.

In those late days of the season, the shop was crowded with us, the children of the city who were clever enough to slip from the watchful eyes of parents and guardians, or whose parents simply did not care to be watchful. Some days our talk and bustle would drive the piper to distraction, and she would send us out with a jerk of her head and the cry "Useless!" Other days she did not seem to mind.

I remember once she let us gather round as she magicked a quill that would never run dry. We filed into the back room, which by now had a square table in its midst. (Strange that I never considered at the time how that little room always seemed large enough and equipped for the task at hand.) Around the table we stood in reverent silence. I was the one who brought the leather-bound tome from the bookshelf, for I knew which volume was required. I will never forget how the others eyed me with unveiled envy—even Lisbet, who had assisted in the work of Alchemists.

_Lyt,_ I will not deny that in those days I was a vain thing, basking in the status that white apron gave me. On the days when the piper declared her hangers-on useless and threw them out, I alone was permitted to stay. It was not every child that earned the envy of Lisbet Sommer.

The quill sat in the center of the table, its paper-thin husk etched painstakingly with runes so tiny they were almost invisible. Then the piper began to read. Again, she did not read aloud, but I swear we could feel the power pouring from her mouth, filling our ears and our insides.

How to describe it? It is that feeling you get when you awake from a nightmare and realize you were only sleeping. But, _nej, _it was more like the sound that the breeze makes across a brook in the first days of spring. Or maybe the vibration of a thunderstorm inside your breast.

_Pis det_, it was none of these. Yet all of them.

Such incredible energy for so simple an object. The quill did not blaze or levitate. It did not even shudder. When the piper closed the book, a single bead of pure black ink dripped onto the tabletop. Magda began to exclaim her praise in glowing terms. The twins began arguing betwixt themselves about which of them had felt the magic most keenly. (_Hvad_? I have not told you of the twins? In time.) Even Edvin was stunned to silence, though only for one precious moment.

"_Storslåede_!" he cried in the next. "It has worked then? The quill will never run dry?"

"_Ja_," said the piper.

Magda and I exchanged a look then, for in his excitement Edvin had forgotten that Enthusiasts refuse to credit the potency of spells. Magda giggled behind her hand. I remember looking at the piper, but she did not betray even a smile at Edvin's enthusiasm.

Of all of us, only Lisbet was not impressed. On that day, she was condescending, with a prim set to her lips and a toss of her head.

"So what?" she said. "It is not so impressive after all."

"Impressive, _nej_," said the piper, lifting the quill with two fingers. "But useful."

"Why do you waste your time on the silly requests of clerks and tradesmen? Surely there are greater tasks to be accomplished."

"Greater tasks," the piper echoed. Her voice was soft. "Like changing lead into gold?"

I remember thinking about the sign on the door. Alchemists un-Welcome. I remember feeling a little bit frightened.

If Lisbet was having similar thoughts, she did not show it. Another toss of her head.

"_Ja_, and greater. My papa will one day unlock the _Vises Sten_."

The piper was quiet for a while. We all were, watching her place the quill in a little wooden box, cover it neatly with thin white paper, snap the lid closed. She handed it to me.

"Deliver this to Herr Larsen."

I nodded and took it from her, but I did not move. I think I was waiting, just like everyone else. Even Lisbet watched the piper closely, her lips still in that prim line. Maybe the sign over the door bothered her more than she would admit. Maybe she wanted to know why Alchemists were un-Welcome.

"Hear this, Fru Sommer," said the piper at last. She looked at Lisbet unblinkingly. "Immortality is a gift for the Sun to give, and even then it would be wise to refuse her generosity. _Forstå_?"

Lisbet stared back. I think she wanted to argue, but she did not. I remember asking her, days later, if she was angry at the piper. She only laughed at me and took the arm of her latest swain. That day she was effervescent.

Still, I think she must have been angry. But why then did she keep coming back?

_Helvede __være __velsignet_, I do not pretend to understand Lisbet Sommer. I had my own problems then. Three rats I had found in my bedroom that week—one of them gnawing a hole in my pillow. I wanted to ask the piper if she knew of an _afværge _that could help, but I was too nervous. I had no money, and I have told you before—the piper did not render services for free.

Once, I remember a woman came into the shop, her hair so thin and her eyes so tired. I thought she was about to cry. She wandered amongst the shelves, stopping to peek out the front window with nervous frequency. Finally, I abandoned the box I was unpacking and asked if I could help her find something. She looked at me for a long time, and I saw then that this was a woman who did not cry. She needed to cry, without a doubt, but she would not.

"A dream." Her voice was brittle parchment, crumbling at the edges.

"_Hvad_?"

"I need a dream, a certain—I can't—"

"Thank you_, _Herr Vestergaard," said the piper, coming from the back room. "I will help her."

She wiped her hands on a rag and led the woman back. I swear I did not try to eavesdrop, but the shop is small and the door was left cracked.

"A dream," repeated the woman. "A certain dream. I've heard—some have said that you—"

"_Nej_," said the piper. "I do not deal in dreams. That is for the witch of the city."

"That is the only way? The witch? But I cannot—please, could you arrange—"

"_Nej_."

"You don't understand. You don't understand how I need it. Please_, Fru_. I am begging you."

"No, I am sorry."

When the woman left, I think she was crying. I did not say anything. I picked up the broom and began to sweep the floor. The piper went to her ledger, where she worked for a long time in silence. At last I could not hold my tongue any longer.

"You do not know where to find the witch?"

"The witch?Of course I do."

"The witch would not give you someone else's dream?"

"I cannot say. Perhaps."

"But why then—"

She looked up from her ledger with a look that silenced me. It was not angry, nor displeased. Searching, I think, is the right word. I know I have a soul because she searched it then and there. I could feel her sight inside me. _Ja_, I sound madder than Jak. But it is what I felt.

"Do you know that woman?" she asked me.

"_Nej_."

"Then why is it your concern?"

"I don't have to know her to see that she needed it."

"Clever boy. You are right. She needed it more than anything else on this earth."

"Still you would not help her?"

"She could not afford it."

That was the end of the conversation.

There was not a soul in Kobenhaven who could understand the way the piper saw the world, as a ledger to be balanced, as an equilibrium to maintain. Nothing is free. Sometimes I wonder if I could have done more to warn the mayor, to warn my city. I wonder if I could have possibly made them understand. But how could I have known the terrible fee she would exact in the end? That when the city refused to pay its debt, she would simply raise that pipe to her lips and play a tune that I cannot remember, but that stole me away from everything I knew.

I can never describe how precisely it happened. It is not a story for telling. I do remember the moonlight on the empty streets (blessedly empty, for the rats were really and truly gone then). I remember that Lisbet was in a gown that shimmered like gossamer. Edvin was barefoot. Magda's hair had no ribbons.

I remember walking without moving and looking without seeing. I remember that the piper never looked back to see who was following. I remember what she told me, on the other side of the _Ø__resund_. "All debts must be paid, Herr Vestergaard."

How can you defend her, even now? _Ja_, the city refused to pay what was owed. But what did we owe her, the children she stole? We gave her our names and with them a power that she used against us. We trusted her, worshipped her, and she betrayed us.

In the end we were only a mark in a ledger, restoring the balance of her world.


	5. Hanna and Beata

**_Hanna and Beata_**

_**X**  
_

The first thing you need to know about the twins is that no one ever had any trouble telling them apart. Beata was the nice one, plump like a plum with a smile like sunlight. I never heard a harsh word from her. Hanna was the rude one, all hard angles and sulking glares. I think I saw her smile, once.

The next thing you need to know about the twins is that they never agreed on anything. Not the weather nor the price of salt nor the distance between Tyksland and the Danmarches. I never knew their true opinions on anything, because all that mattered to Hanna was that Beata was wrong and all that mattered to Beata was that Hanna was wrong. I recall one day Hanna cursing the filthy rat horde while Beata extolled the virtue of all God's creatures. The next day Beata called them the scum of the earth as Hanna set out bread crumbs.

They were Magda's cousins, I think. Or second-cousins. Or the daughters of her father's uncle. _Pis det, _I cannot remember now. It is not important. Magda couldn't stand them. I think that is because Beata would lovingly tug her braids and call her pet names. I'm not sure Hanna ever spoke to her.

It was the twins who had the idea first. I don't know which of them first voiced the thought. I doubt they did either. I just remember that one day I was sweeping the shop, jabbing the broom between Edvin's feet because he refused to move from where he leaned against the countertop. Lisbet was there, I think, reading a book from the section about the _Spåkoner_. Magda was perched atop the counter, kicking her legs and recalling the story of her broken ankle to Edvin. The piper was sitting in her usual spot, hunched over her ledger, ignoring us all.

In came the twins, Beata bursting first through the door, Hanna trailing along behind.

"_Hej alle_," greeted Beata, forgetting to wipe her shoes on the doormat, as usual.

Behind Hanna, a fat rat nosed its way across the threshold, but something changed its mind because it scurried away as if its tail were afire. I'd noticed several rats with the same reaction to the dragon-green door. You would not believe how bold they grew in those mid-autumn days. We laid traps around our beds at night and counted ourselves lucky if we awoke with only a couple of bites. _Se, _this scar on my hand I received after there was no more food in our house, and a rat decided that my flesh would be good for eating.

You have to understand how desperate we were then. You have to understand that the food was almost gone, the water was contaminated with their leavings, the streets of our beautiful City of Spires were awash with them. They had taken over. There was nowhere else to turn.

That is why you have to forgive the twins for what they began that day. How could they have known?

But I get ahead of myself. Here is what transpired in the shop on that day.

"I have had the best idea," said Beata.

"It was my idea," said Hanna.

"Liar!"

"_Nej_, you always try to steal—"

"You're the one who—"

But you do not need to know the whole argument. In truth, I do not know if I remember it well. All of their spats sounded so much the same. In the end it was Magda who stopped it, begging them to stop pestering the _Frue_ while she worked. Magda knew the piper's current expression was a precursor to imminent dismissal of the lot of them. No one was keen to be outside the shop in those days.

"_Fru_, surely you can get rid of the rats, _ja_?" asked Beata.

"Not for free."

It was a response we all knew well. Many customers received the same line, and so had many of us, time and time again. I wonder sometimes what she did with all that money. The shop remained exactly the same as it had been on the day she first opened the door. Her clothes were always the same unimpressive grey wool. The Bergère hat she wore when some business called her out of doors never gained a feather or a flower as ornamentation.

The piper never seemed to use money, so I do not know why she was always so exacting with her fee.

But that is irrelevant.

"_Ja_, but the mayor can pay you. I have already told him my idea."

"My idea," said Hanna, but we all ignored her.

The piper had looked up from her ledger by now. She stared at Beata for a few seconds, then went back to her work.

"If the mayor wants to hire me, then he will hire me."

"What did my father say?" Magda asked Beata.

"He would think on it," said Beata. She looked so proud of herself.

"That means no," Magda informed her.

Edvin began to detail the physical impossibilities of ridding an entire city of rats with only magic, but we all ignored that too. He stopped when Lisbet shut her book and came over.

"Do you really think you could do it?" she demanded of the piper. "You could rid Kobenhaven of the rats?"

You must keep in mind that by this point, the city had tried every conceivable method of killing the vermin. Traps took care of hundreds of them, but there were thousands, and every day a hundred more seemed to arrive. Poison seemed the obvious solution, but the rats learned quickly, and the mounting corpses of dogs and cats and one poor little child of three finally put a stop to that attempt. One _Tryllekunstner _announced that he had vanished them—and it seemed that he had—until we realized that he had only succeeded in making them invisible. It was days before someone figured out how to reverse that catastrophe of a spell. By then the infestation had become unholy. The Barefoot Monks declared that we had angered God and this was only the first of the ten plagues of old. The Spåkoner were whispering about the Purge of Absalom, a final cleansing so that the days of Ancient Magic could begin anew. The D_ødmestre _in their alleys were quiet as death, but so were they always.

In those days, all I really cared about was sweeping the floor and organizing the bookshelves and hoping that the day never came when the piper told me that Magda's debt had been paid. I have told you before—I was a_ lille fjols. _

I have lost myself again. What was I speaking of?

_Ja, ja, _Lisbet had asked the piper if she could really do it.

"It is not impossible," replied the piper. "It would not be easy, but it could be done—Fru Riis, _lyt,_ if you do not get off my clean countertop I will _vende dine ører i kål_."

Magda slid to the floor immediately.

"How much would it cost?" she asked.

"More, I think, than the mayor can pay," said the piper. I think she was smiling, but I cannot be sure. I was busy pretending to sweep.

"Whatever it is, it would be worth it," said Beata.

For the first time in their lives, Hanna did not disagree.

When I think back on that day, I wonder if that was the moment when it all began. If all the spheres of the heavens were just waiting for the twins to nod in agreement. If that alignment of the stars allowed everything to happen.

I sound like a _Spåkone_ with this nonsense. I have told you before, I am a _fugl af luften_. My head is ever in the clouds.

Later, when the piper went to the back room to mix up some concoction or another, we were not invited. So we hovered restlessly in the empty shop, eyeing each other, each of us thinking the words but none of us willing to speak them. Magda was the first (but wasn't she always?).

"We must convince the city to hire the _Frue_."

"It is the only way," agreed Beata.

"I said that ages ago," said Hanna.

"You act as if she could really do it," said Edvin, but he didn't sound convinced by his own cynicism.

"She can," said Magda. Her lower lip jutted out in familiar defiance, and she glared at each of us in turn, daring us to disagree.

"If anyone can, it's the _Frue_," said I. (Ah, _lille fjols_—but could I have stopped it then? Surely the spheres were already in motion.)

Edvin couldn't meet Magda's gaze. He did not reply. Only Lisbet had not spoken her piece. She was leaned against the bookshelf again, pretending to be immersed in her book. Eventually the weight of our stares drew her attention.

She gave a little laugh.

"_Ja_, it would be something to see. My papa will talk to the mayor."

So confidently and coolly she spoke them—the words that would damn us all. She put away the book and floated out of the shop without giving a farewell. One of her swains was across the street, waiting. She was laughing again as she called out to him. Even now I remember the sight of her, with her skirts swooshing on the cobblestones, her golden hair in a long braid down her back. In that moment the rats would not come near her. She was effervescent. As far as I know, it was the last time she ever would be.

_Lyt_, I am not saying it was anyone's fault. Or maybe I am saying it was everyone's fault. Maybe we all had our part to play.

_Nej_, I will not believe that. It was the alignment of the stars, the movement of the spheres, the spell of the piper. When I was a waif of ten, years before I first saw the piper, I paid a copper for a _Spåkone_ to read my fortune in the cards. She split the deck and dealt them with impossible deftness for fingers so gnarled and bent. When she leaned forward to study them, I could smell saffron seeping through her pores.

"_Fugl af luften_," she crooned at last, with a sigh that broke my heart. "You will fly far, my _lille fugl_, but you will not land until you are back where you began."

She pointed at each card as she spoke, but I do not remember them. I only remember her voice. Salt in an open wound.

"Six to leave you, one to leave you behind. You will not find what you seek, my _lille fugl_. Not in this life. Maybe in the next. That is all the cards have to say."

I did not know what she meant. How could I? I had expected—_pis det, _I do not know what I expected. What does any boy of ten expect from his life? All I know is that the crone was right, I did not find it. Maybe in the next life.

But you do not care to hear about this. There were six that left me. That leaves one with a story I have yet to tell.


	6. Jak

**_Jak_**

**_X  
_**

We were all a little afraid of Jak. It wasn't that he was frightening. _Nej_, he was just different. He wasn't like the rest of us, with parents and grammar primers and pinching shoes to make us look respectable. Jak lived in the abbey hospital with the Barefoot Monks. He wasn't sick, but he wasn't well either. "Mental affliction," was the Blackfeets' term. "Spiders in the head," Magda called it. "_Vrides-_crazy," said my mother.

The piper, after a few seconds of careful thought, said, "There's nothing wrong with the way he thinks. There's something wrong with the way we listen."

I don't know why I believed her. She was probably as _vrides-_crazy as Jak was. But maybe it's too easy to say that of the piper. Maybe it's too easy to say it of Jak.

He wasn't stupid, even though most people assumed he was. You should have heard the way they spoke to him, if they ever got up the nerve. You would've thought they were talking to a two-year-old, half-deaf Norgen. I don't think Jak minded, but how should I know? Jak was always smiling, even in that boat on the _Ø__resund_—a crooked grin from ear to ear. Maybe he didn't know what was happening—although sometimes I think he did, and that was why he smiled.

_Lyt, _I've said it before—if there was ever a sorry soul who understood Jak, I never met them. Maybe the piper understood him, but it's not as if she would ever tell his secrets. He certainly never told hers, and I have a feeling he knew every single one.

He was the one who suggested that she use the pipe.

It was very late the night after Magda's father had finally been convinced to edge his way into the shop and ask the impossible of the piper. She did not make our mayor beg, neither did she bend to his argument that it was her civil duty to rid Kobenhaven of the rats. She calmly requested his signature on a contract of payment—I glimpsed the price she named, and _sgu stjernerne_, the piper was right when she told Magda it was more than the mayor could pay.

"But surely you must see that you owe this to our city," he contested, even as he picked up the quill.

"It is not my city and neither is it yours," replied the piper. "The rats own it fairly, and you are asking me to drive them out."

In the end the mayor signed, even adding a princely flourish to the evidence of our damnation.

"But why does it cost so much?" I asked the piper, after the mayor had left. "Is the magic so expensive?"

"Herr Vestergaard, you are still here? _Nej_, the magic will cost me nothing."

"Then why must the mayor pay so much?"

(Because she was a grasping and heartless is the answer to that question, my friend. But _lille fjols_ that I was, I wanted there to be a kinder answer.) I waited.

"Because magic is always expensive," she told me. "And it must always cost someone something. Only the Moon and Sun may give such gifts so freely, and even they have ways of exacting a fee."

(I do not know why she spoke thus about the sun and moon. Do not bother asking.)

"But why?" I pressed.

She had sat down at her ledger, entering items and figures into the endless columns, ensuring that everything balanced to the half-penny. She never answered my question.

I have lost myself. You are wondering about Jak. It was hours before he made himself known, and I have no idea how long he had been there. He used to skulk in the back room, appearing long enough to make us all uncomfortable, then vanishing again. The piper never seemed to mind him. I asked her once if she was worried he would damage something back there. Without looking up from her work, she said no. And the matter was closed.

I had finished sweeping and dusting long before, but I kept floating around the shop, pretending to be busy. I did not want to leave. I wanted to know why the piper had stopped with her ledger and moved to the back room, where she now stood in front of the tall shelf of dark volumes, eyes tracing each spine methodically.

"Herr Vestergaard, stop hovering," she told me at one point. "It is distracting. If you do not wish to leave, then make yourself useful."

With relish, I made myself useful. Stack by stack, we removed books from the shelf. Standing side by side at the table, we poured over them. You see, the clever piper, purveyor of _practsiske magi_, wielder of arcane knowledge and mistress of the shop with the dragon-green door, was at a loss. She was not sure how to rid the town completely of rats.

"I know it can be done," she told me. "There are ways, but not all are failsafe."

When I suggested that she just try all these methods together in hopes that one would work, she ignored me as if such a clumsy attempt did not even bear thinking of.

"Other ways are better suited to the D_ødmestre _in their alleys," she said. Her eyes and fingers hovered briefly over a tome of cracked leather. The symbol etched on the cover made my eyes water and my teeth ache. Then she shook her head and put it back on the shelf.

"I fear the price for that is more than even I can pay," she said.

I looked on in silence. I do not think she was talking to me in particular, and this strange side of the piper was a rare spell that I did not wish to shatter. She opened another book and I returned my attention to the one in front of me (as if I could understand any of the ancient magic contained in the pages).

We had been standing in silence for a long time when Jak's voice came from the shadows at the corner of the room.

"The pipe," was all he said.

I could not know then what those words would bring upon us. I could not know that the soft touch of his voice in the silence was the beginning of the end. I was only angry at him for being there, for ruining the mystique of that moment I shared with the piper. (How it pains me now to think of my own stupidity.)

I wanted the piper to be annoyed with his cryptic lunacies. I wanted her to tell him to leave.

Instead, she nodded.

"_Ja_, _min ven_," she said.

Her friend—that is what she always called him. She never used his name, as with the rest of us. Maybe she did not truly know it—but that is idiocy. I am sounding more like her at every moment. Jak's name was Jak Ravn, and everyone knew it. There was nothing special about him except that he was _vrides-_crazy and the piper called him _min ven_. And well, there was that night, after the _rats_, when he—but _nej_, I lose myself again.

"That may be the answer," she told him.

Jak's head tilted sideways, like it sometimes did. I hated the look of that. Like he was detaching from himself. He was grinning. The piper looked at me expectantly.

"The pipe," she repeated.

I fetched it, seething all the while that I had been demoted to errand boy. I thought about going home, but it was not a serious thought. How could I stand to miss what she would do next?

I have told you before about the night-wood pipe in its bed of green velvet. The box was closed tonight. I carried it before me like a holy treasure, but when I set it on the table, the piper opened it without ceremony. She nodded briskly to herself, as if satisfied that the contents were as they should be. I had never dusted the pipe—never dared go near it—but it glistened darkly.

Jak made a sound like a laugh, strangled in his throat. Then he pressed both palms against his forehead, wrenching at his hair with calloused fingers. He rocked back and forth in place. This, like the tilting of his head, was a habit of his that made me shudder. The piper did not pay him any mind.

She picked up the pipe, twisted it twice in her hand, testing the weight and the length. She put it to her lips and blew. Not a sound came out, neither note nor breath. She seemed satisfied.

Jak was laughing properly now. I wanted to slap the back of his head—something I had seen shopkeepers and disquieted granddames do to silence his eccentricities. But the piper never looked kindly on such treatment of Jak. Besides, at that moment she put the pipe in my hands, and Jak stopped laughing.

I stared at it. Even now I cannot make sense of the thoughts that quickened in my head. I do not know what to tell you. I wish I could say that I felt the evil of the instrument in my hands, that I felt a shiver of the doom that awaited us all.

But it is not true. It was only a pipe after all. Cool on my palms and beautifully carved.

The piper opened a book, found the right page, and began to mouth the words.

I have tried to explain it to you before, the way that the magic is every sensation imaginable, and yet like nothing you've ever felt. But words are not enough, and I will not waste them trying. I'm not sure when exactly Jak left, but by the time the piper had finished the spell, he was gone. The pipe felt unchanged. She took it from me.

"It is late, Herr Vestergaard," she said.

"_Ja_."

"Your parents will worry."

"_Nej_."

"Then come with me."

We left through the dragon-green door and she locked it carefully behind us. Overhead the painted sign creaked wistfully in the breeze. The piper did not walk far, only to the center of the street. The rats were thick in the darkness. I felt them as I walked, swarming at the edges of my footsteps.

"There is something you must understand, Herr Vestergaard, before I begin."

I waited.

"There is a price for everything, an exact balance that will be maintained. You have been told that the world is not fair, but this is not true. The world is absolutely fair. In the end, all debts are paid."

I nodded, thinking I understood, thinking her words were wisdom from heaven.

Then she put the pipes to her lips and began to play.

As one, the rats stilled and raised their heads, whiskers twitching. It was an eerie sight. I followed the piper as she began to walk, as all across the city the rats abandoned our cupboards and pantries and flooded into the cool midnight air. The streets became rivers of greasy brown and grey, of sharp teeth and pink tails.

I cannot get it out of my head—the way the rats looked that night. Mindlessly captivated, as if they were no longer even rats. As if they had become something else entirely, something that only existed to follow the piper.

Is that what we looked like, only seven days later?

_Nej_, I will not lose myself this time.

We did not have far to go in this strange procession. She took the street opposite the shop with the dragon-green door, straight to the shores of the sound. (That street is gone now, uprooted for the summer palace that our blessed and humble queen named in her own honor.) The piper stood still on the bank while her magic drove the rats down the slope. I stayed close to her side. _Ja_, I was a little frightened of the enormity of that night, as I realized what was to happen. Thousands upon thousands of little bodies splashed into the water. Some swam for a distance. Others disappeared immediately into the dark depths. It went on for almost an hour. The Blackfeets were tolling the bells as the last rats rushed headlong to their death.

Do not mourn their demise. They were slowly killing us all. Our City of Spires was collapsing under their tyranny. The piper saved Kobenhaven that night. I witnessed it with my own eyes, watched as the last rats streamed past my feet, listened as the bells toned a sweet, sweet requiem.

The bells had not yet silenced when Jak ran past me, his shoulder brushing mine. He half-slid down the bank, stopped at the edge of the water, began to shout—_nej_, there is no other way to say it, he was howling. He howled into the open sky, upwards toward the glaring hunter's moon. The bells fell silent and his cry remained, a keening echo in the empty air. I looked to the piper. She had not moved. We did not speak again that night, and Jak's howl followed me into my slumber.

When I became a man grown, and my wandering feet brought me back to Kobenhaven, I paid a visit to the witch of the city. _Ja_, my City of Spires has lost the magic that once coursed through its veins, but the witch is still here, if you know where to look. I asked for a dream and one was given to me. No price was named, for I had already paid it.

I do not know what I hoped for, as I held my dream tightly to my chest and let sleep carry me away. What I found was the hunter's moon, massive and golden in the sky, its reflection rippling in the dark waters of the _Ø__resund_. Jak's howl filled my body and soul. The rats were gone forever, and the piper looked at me and said, "In the end, all debts are paid."

When I woke up and every day since, I have wondered if that means one day she will pay hers.


	7. End Ord

_**For Clar the ever-practical Pirate.  
**_

* * *

_**End Ord**  
_

_**X  
**_

_Lyt, _you know the rest of the story, and I grow weary with the telling. Do not ask me where she led the children that she stole. To slavery in Byzantium, likely as not. Or to sleep with the _troldfolk _in the perilous deep of the mountains majestic. No doubt you've heard the tales, and if you want to know the truth of it, I can't help you. The only truth of it is that none of them were ever seen again.

Except for the nights when Magda cries in the foggy moonlight, and I reach to comfort her, but somehow my hand never touches living flesh.

_Sgu_ _stjernerne_, I sound as mad as Jak. You shouldn't let me carry on this way. The truth of it is that they tell me I was the lucky one, and I try every day to believe it. _Hvad__, _you wish to know why she left me? You wish to know how it was that a _fugl af luften _was immune to the spell of the piper's song? It happened like this:

We reached the far shore of the _Ø__resund_. Magda's tears had dried, but she clung to me still. Even now I remember the warmth of her. We all huddled together, lost and confused, our heads thick with the magic of the pipe. That far shore was not as it is today. It was once a wilderland of ancient trees and slithering sounds, and looming overhead, so cold and merciless against the night sky, were the mountains. The piper stood apart from us, her back to the cold wind of the sound, her eyes fixed on the summit peaks. I gave Magda over to Beata—I do not know why—and I went to the piper.

"_Ja_, Herr Vestergaard?" she asked. Her voice was strange comfort.

"Where are we going?"

"That is not for you to know."

"How far?"

"Not as far as you will fly, I think, _min_ _fugl af luften_. But far enough."

Even then I did not understand.

"Will they follow?"

"Your parents? Your city? I hope they will, but _nej_, it will be too late."

"Too late for what?"

"All debts must be paid, Herr Vestergaard."

She looked at me then_. _

"And you have paid yours," she told me.

That was when I understood. Six to leave me, one to leave me behind.

She raised the pipe to her lips and began to play. But the music held no magic for me, the boy without a debt to pay. And they left me there, alone on the shore of the _Ø__resund_.

Did I want to follow?

Do not ask me that. It is a question without an answer.

I do not know why she led me as far as the distant shore, but I did not go home. I have told you before, I was a _fugl af luften_. I flew fast and far because I had nowhere else to go. _Helvede __være __velsignet_, the tales I could tell you of those long years I wandered—but that is for another day. All you need to know is that those years saved my life.

I did not know it then, but even though the rats were all drowned in the _Ø__resund_, they left something behind. Or that's what the Barefoot Monks told me, when my feet finally found the way home. When I returned to Kobenhaven, I found a different place. Gone were the magicians on the corners, the fortune tellers in the squares. The rune streets ran with waste, and the spires had lost their gleam. The shop with the dragon-green door was empty and dark. Only the _D__ødmestre_ still skulked in the alleys, shadows in the corner of my vision. The masters of death had grown gluttonous in Kobenhaven those years past.

You will not weep when I tell you, for the Plague is only a chapter in the histories now. But believe me when I tell you that I wept that day, and that night, and for a month and a day after that. The piper had freed us from the rats, but what could she do about the disease they left in their wake?

Sometimes in the night, after I've comforted Magda and cursed the piper, I wonder where she led the few that had been chosen, and who they became in the wide, wide world. I wonder if that boat brought them to damnation or salvation, and what it means that she left me behind. Another question without an answer.

I have lost myself.

My City of Spires is gone from me. Even in memory and dreams I cannot have it back. Your city is not the Kobenhaven that was. The Enthusiasts told us that we had to leave the dark ages behind and so we followed them into enlightenment, but do not let them make you forget. Once this was a place of the _mystiske_. Once a shop with a dragon-green door sold potions for headaches and remedies for spider bites and answers to questions. Once a pipe charmed a city of rats to their doom. Once a piper stole six children as payment for a debt.

Once a _spåkone _who smelled of saffron took a _fugl af luften _by the hand and told him he would fly far, but he would not find what he sought, and she was right. Maybe in the next life.

_Lyt_, that is all I have to say. Why don't you leave a _lille fugl _in peace.


	8. Glossary of Terms

**If you've already read this story, sorry to disappoint: this is just a glossary. I've updated the story to its second draft (which cuts the Danish down by about 60%). I know that some people like neat definitions, so I went ahead and compiled this list. (If you'd rather not have it all spelled out, then by all means ignore this.) I've probably forgotten a few. If a term or phrase that I forgot is really gnawing at you, then you can always ask. **

**Note: If it reads like a swear, then that's probably what it is. I did not feel the need to translate those for you. **

**Glossary of terms:**

_Afværge (_p._ Afværger_)_ – _a warding charm/symbol

_Alder af Oplysningstiden_ – Age of Enlightenment

_Dødmester (p. Dødmestre ) –_ type of necromancer

_Draug_ – a fabled skeletal ghost thought to come up alongside boats in a ghoulish half-boat and drag sailors to a watery grave

_Fugl_ _af luften – _bird of the air

_Hvad_ – what

_Ja_ - yes

_Lille fjols _– little fool

_Lyt_ – listen

_Nej_ - no

_Øresund – _the sound

_Prakstisk Magi _- Practical Magic

_Rundetårn – _Round Tower (fun fact: this is a real place in Copenhagen)

_Spåkone (_p._ Spåkoner) – _fortune-teller

_Tryllekunstner (_p._ Tryllekunstnere) – _common street magician

_Troldfolk – _trolls that are thought to live in the mountain deeps


End file.
